Seduction and Nightmares: The Cosmic Horror That Makes Us Question Our Own Humanity

 

The premise of Under the Skin sounds like a pitch a coked-up screenwriter would sell to Netflix after their third line: an alien disguised as a woman seduces Scottish men in a white van. It’s basically To Catch a Predator with the roles reversed and directed by someone who’s apparently never seen a Hollywood movie in their life. Jonathan Glazer, the music video director who decided he’d tortured enough British bands, delivers a work that feels like David Lynch gave birth to Species after a bad night on hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Scarlett Johansson—yes, the one who earns more than the GDP of some small countries—takes on this genuinely kamikaze role where she seduces ordinary Glasgow blokes. Picture the absurdity: the woman who usually pockets millions to save the universe in spandex is now hunting Scottish plumbers with the methodical dedication of an entomologist collecting specimens. Glazer, in a move that swings between genius and clinical insanity, sets Johansson loose incognito on the streets with real people who don’t recognize her. It’s like a perverse sociological experiment where Scotland is the lab and the viewer is the actual lab rat.

The result is a cinematic experience that feels like being trapped in an elevator with HAL 9000 while the Eraserhead soundtrack plays in the background. Glazer crafts each scene like a Swiss watchmaker assembling a deadly, ticking bomb: every element calculated for maximum discomfort. Mica Levi’s score isn’t music; it’s auditory torture designed to torment even the most resilient nervous system. This isn’t entertainment—it’s a brutal test of psychological endurance.

What makes Under the Skin genuinely unsettling isn’t cheap jump scares or buckets of fake blood. It’s how Glazer transforms the primal act of seduction into something utterly otherworldly. Every conversation Johansson has with her victims feels like a live dissection: she learns about humanity while we watch real men get duped by a cosmic hidden camera. It’s Borat, but if Sacha Baron Cohen were a homicidal alien with an existential identity crisis.

Glazer’s sadistic genius lies in turning the familiar into the utterly terrifying. A white van—the universal vehicle of kidnappers—becomes almost a spaceship. A beautiful woman—the archetype of male desire—morphs into something wholly anti-human. Glasgow, a city that already feels post-apocalyptic, serves as the perfect backdrop for this urban nightmare. It’s as if The Twilight Zone had an illegitimate child with Planet Earth and raised it watching too much Twin Peaks.

But here’s the cruel twist: as we watch these men walk toward their doom at the hands of a terrifying alien, Glazer forces us to confront our own predatory nature. Who’s the real monster? The seductress or the viewer watching with morbid fascination? The film acts as a dark mirror, reflecting our basest instincts while asking: how different is the viewer from this entity studying humans like specimens? Maybe, probably not much.

Under the Skin doesn’t aim to be Hollywood’s favorite horror movie; it aims to be a permanent fixture in our nightmares. Glazer has created something that transcends the genre because, fundamentally, he’s grasped an uncomfortable truth: the most effective horror doesn’t come from what’s seen but from what it reveals about ourselves. In an era where cinematic horror has evolved from simple scares to deep psychological exploration—Hereditary, Midsommar, The Lighthouse—this film is the primordial DNA of that mutation.

Under the Skin is a brutal treatise on loneliness disguised as a sci-fi film, a study of empathy narrated as cosmic horror. Glazer offers no answers because the right questions are far scarier than any monster could be. Under the Skin is art that unsettles. Under the Skin is pure existential dread.